Technical Field
The present disclosure relates generally to managing and scheduling conference or meeting room. More particularly, but not by way of limitation, this disclosure relates to a method, system and computer program for automatically determining a conference room based on the number of actual participants that are present in the conference room in real-time.
Background Art
Recent years have seen advancement in collaborative approaches and tools for online and offline meetings. However, despite these advancements, there are still challenges that need to be met when it comes to scheduling a conference or meeting room to accommodate the number of participants. What is needed is a system that can save a user time in finding an appropriate meeting room that can accommodate the number of participants that were invited to the meeting and be able to offer alternative conference room in real-time as to the actual number of participants that show up to the meeting room. Further, such meeting room has the capacity and equipment necessary for the meeting.
Conventional meeting management systems exist that can automatically schedule meetings for attendees. But such meeting management systems lack intelligence for scheduling meeting rooms for an appropriate number of attendees or participants. Basically, after a time and day are chosen for the meeting, traditional meeting management systems require the organizer to choose from a list of available meeting rooms. One drawback to this method is that the organizer may not know the size of the meeting room nor the resources available for that particular meeting room. The organizer may choose a meeting room that comfortable accommodates four participants but in reality the organizer may have ten participants. Another drawback to this method is that the organizer may not have sufficient information about the resources available in the rooms, such as seating capacity or the audio/visual capability of each room, for instance. This means that when selecting from available rooms to schedule, the organizer must try and remember what rooms have which resources. This can be an error prone process, particularly for a large enterprise having multiple buildings in multiple jobsites, with multiple conference rooms per building. Even with a list of the conference rooms and their resources, the organizer who is attempting to reserve a room through a traditional room resource management system still must input the room into the system manually.
Another drawback to this method is that the organizer is limited to being able to select only from those rooms and resources that are available at the time he or she he scheduling the meeting, which may not be the best utilization of the room and or resources. Current room resource management system allows for rooms to be utilized inefficiently, such as for example, when a large group of people is forced to attempt to fit into a smaller meeting room because a room more adequate to the group's size is reserved by a smaller group (e.g., 40 people crammed into a 20 person conference room). Such mistakes in room reservations are typically made unknowingly, and there is believed to be no remedy for this within today's room resource management systems without manual interaction.
Employees are increasing working from home and going on frequent trips. However, people can still attend meetings remotely by phoning into the meeting from wherever they are—home, traveling, or even from their cubicles or offices. Current room resource management systems, however, only know the total number of attendees of a scheduled meeting and have no way of determining which meeting rooms are optimum for which groups, such that a large room may be booked for a small number of attendees who will be actually physically present at the meeting. This may leave another meeting with a large number of attendees with legitimate needs for a large room deprived from an optimum conference room.
Accordingly, it is the object of the present disclosure to automatically determine a meeting room based on the number of invitees and actual number of participants physically attending the meeting.